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All posts for the month April, 2012

Back from Athens

Posted by Shai Shapira on April 29, 2012
Posted in: Meta Blogging, Personal. Tagged: , , . Leave a Comment

I’m back from Athens, and will go back to making quasi-successful attempts at programming soon. Meanwhile, some insights:

1. Very fun city, very nice people. The Plaka is one of the best neighbourhoods I’ve seen.

2. They have police *everywhere*. I don’t exactly live in the most relaxed region in the world, but even I’m a bit surprised to walk along a street and see five uniformed people with riot shields and body armor, just standing around. On the other hand, the streets felt quite safe.

3. Like Hebrew, Greek has that weird thing where the same word is used for “please” and “you’re welcome”. I never understood how that started.

4. Conspicuously absent from all the tourist / historical areas: Aristotle, Zeno, Diogenes, Xenophon, and almost every other famous ancient Athenian, even Socrates is barely present. On the other hand, there are around 10,000 things names after Eleftherios Venizelos who, if I understand correctly, single-handedly won the first world war, expanded Greek territory to several planets and trained an army of tigers as personal servants.

5. They have a dude’s heart kept in a box in their national history museum. I don’t really know what to say about that.

I’d end this post with Γεια σου, but it turns out that unlike the popular image I grew up on, they don’t really say that much. So… Καλημέρα?

Linux support coming soon

Posted by Shai Shapira on April 18, 2012
Posted in: Meta Blogging, Software Developement. Leave a Comment

At last, I found out what made my programs fail on Linux. Now I want to test it more seriously, and then release new official versions.

If you’re wondering what took me so long (and why I’ve been so quiet lately), I’ve been pretty sick for the past week. And next week I’m on vacation[1], so there won’t be any news here until the week after. But hopefully, we’ll see some good things then. Starting with a little post about writing cross-platform code in Java, I guess…

 

[1] Finally going to see Athens, a cradle of western civilization. Γειά σου!

Bunch of Things #2

Posted by Shai Shapira on April 7, 2012
Posted in: Bunch of Things. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

1. One of my favourite things is finding new modes for multiplayer gaming. Today I learned that some recent Assassin’s Creed games have a “Wanted” mode, which seems very nice, at least from the video. If not for my poor opinion of Assassin’s Creed, I’d be looking forward to trying it.

2. I don’t remember where, but recently I heard about Felix the peacful monk – a guy playing Skyrim without killing anyone (but actually playing and completing missions, not just calmly enjoying the world). I loved it – another one to my series of “FPS[1] gaming not based on walking around shooting stuff”.

3. I finished Trine last weekend – great game. I really loved the thief and wizard’s mechanics, they should appear more in platformers. Also, I think this game is a great example of inserting combat for no reason – the combat is just annoying in my opinion. I think they only put it there because too many people see it as unthinkable to have a game without combat these days[2].

4. Gog.com is having a sale, 50% off all games in the Might & Magic universe. If you’re like me and love the Heroes of Might & Magic series, you might want to check it out – each of the first four games is 4.99$ for this weekend.

[1] Yes, I know Skyrim isn’t technically an FPS, but it’s close enough for me.
[2] Am I starting to turn into an anti-gaming-violence crusader? I really don’t object to combat in games, I just think people are doing it so much, they are overlooking other, potentially interesting ideas.

Making a text-based game

Posted by Shai Shapira on April 5, 2012
Posted in: Adventure Games, Game Developement, Games. Leave a Comment

I’ve been working on a text-based game for a programming competition at moosader.com. It’s advancing nicely and results should appear soon, meanwhile I’m just getting some insights.

I’m generally quite skeptical about text-based games. I think that even if graphics are a bit overrated in modern commercial games, they’re still very important. Also, I’ve seen many games with bad graphics over the years and unlike what one might think, there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between bad graphics and good gameplay. People who don’t work on getting good graphics often don’t invest the extra time in improving gameplay, but instead I feel[1] a correlation the other way around – bad gameplay and bad graphics are both characteristic of inexperienced, unprofessional developers[2].

However, there does seem to be a little difference with purely text-based. The difference between bad graphics and no graphics turned out to be very serious – Here I’m not making a game with one feature removed, but instead I make myself find completely different mechanics – I can try things that simply won’t work (or will seem very out of place) in a graphical game. Hopefully my game for the competition will provide a little example of that. Maybe I should start trying some other people’s text-based games. I remember hearing about a serious text adventure community somewhere out there. Not to mention Nethack.

That said, this stuff also makes me think about combined graphical / textual adventure games. They had a few good years long ago with games like Quest for Glory 1 & 2, Police Quest 1 & 2, and some King’s Quests and Space Quests, but then they were gone, and mouse mechanics took over. This is disappointing not only because they were great games (especially Quest for Glory), but because with modern improvements in natural language processing, we could make something really great. Here’s another item to the list of games I should make someday.

 

[1] Purely anecdotal of course, I did not study it.

[2] Myself included, I don’t deny. But I’m working on it.

I’m now on DeviantArt

Posted by Shai Shapira on April 2, 2012
Posted in: Visual Arts. Leave a Comment

A little piece of news – I now have a DeviantArt account. I’ll use it for all my future renders and explorations in 3D graphics, generated graphics, mathematics-inspired graphics and such. If you like those stuff, you’re more than welcome to start following it:

http://shaishap.deviantart.com/

Here in the blog I’ll only show stuff if they have some unusual property or interesting insight, general pretty-looking things will go to DeviantArt. Enjoy!